Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong

deadline for submissions:

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Abstract sumission deadline is now extended to May 15th, 2017

submission via email: cpch.notice@eduhk.hk (Mr. Manni Cheung, Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong)

The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities and the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce The Third International Conference on Popular Culture and Education, which will take place in Hong Kong, July 20th-22nd, 2017.

Academic institutions are structured so that different disciplines are housed in different departments. However, in recent years, there has been a call to augment the interdisciplinary scope of the humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This push for greater interdisciplinarity in the humanities has resulted from many factors including the need to recruit students to increase humanities enrollments, a desire to sustain student interest in the humanities, better employment opportunities for those on the academic job market, and the production of unique, multi-faceted scholarship.

Documents play roles in all aspects of human life. Recognizing this, the Document Academy seeks to celebrate and explore documents beyond traditional and formal academic research publications. We take inspiration from works such as Pablo Neruda's odes to common things and memoir essays telling the stories of particular documents, such as “The Money,” by Junot Diaz. Such approaches have the capacity to illuminate aspects of reality that are overlooked by traditional academic research.

While digital technologies are generally seen as empowering because they offer increased scholarship opportunities and resources through Open Access, affordable education through MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses), and unlimited interpersonal interactions through social media, why is it that in South Asian countries, access to digital technologies only perpetuates existing social divisions? Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey in their landmark study, The Great Indian Phone Book (2013) describe the mobile phone as a remarkable agent of change, but just how economically and socially leveliing is this change?

The 17th annual Atlantic Center for Learning Communities (ACLC) Curriculum Planning Retreat* will be held October 18-20, 2017, at Holy Family Passionist Retreat Center in West Hartford, CT.** We are seeking proposals for workshops that fall within the general theme of “Bridging Cultural Divides through Integrative Learning.” How do practitioners of learning communities consciously address and actively seek to help bridge political, economic, racial, ethnic, gender, religious and other “divides”? What successes and challenges do we face when encountering such divides in our learning communities? How do faculty, staff and administrators model community that is committed to bridging such divides?

Writing Center directors and consultants, including student tutors, are welcome to join us on Saturday, April 22, 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m., as presenters or attenders of this research- and experienced-based conference.

In her poem "To Be of Use," Marge Piercy simultaneously acknowledges the commonness and affirms the importance of “work that is real.” With this poem in mind, numerous questions about the work of our Centers can be entertained, including but not limited to these:

--Who uses our Centers, and why? Alternatively, who doesn't use our Centers, and why not? To what extent is data collection helpful here, yielding what observations and resulting in what changes?

JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism—a print academic journal published by Michigan State University Press—announces a call for articles and reviews for our twelfth year of issues. We are interested in articles on radicalism in a wide range of contexts and areas, and encourage articles from humanities and social science perspectives. The Journal for the Study of Radicalism engages in serious, scholarly exploration of the forms, representations, meanings, and historical influences of radical social movements.

The intersection of globalization and American style higher education is perhaps most keenly expressed in the necessity of the English language as a connecting force. However, as the lingua franca of many ‘global’ or ‘international’ liberal arts programs, it is more than just a medium of instruction. English operates as the defacto language of globalized higher education, with the assumption that it can be dehistoricized and value-free. Yet faculty teaching in international contexts know that English medium education biases many higher education practices, including text selection, the subordination of other languages, and often an associated second class treatment of non-Western cultures.